This machine holds the same sort of fascination that backhoes and pile drivers do: large, loud, cool industrial machinery, used for completely boring reasons. Presenting the UT-1 Ultra Trencher, the size of a condo and selling for a measly 10 millions pounds:

“Weighting 50 tonnes and the size of a small house, it is designed to bury largediameter oil and gas pipelines laid on the ocean floor. It does this by ‘flying’ down up to a mile deep below the surface using powerful propellers. It then lands over the pipeline and deploys a pair of ‘jet swords’ either side of the pipe which inject high pressure water to ‘fluidise’ the surface. Burying the pipelines protects them from fishing, shipwrecks and natural currents. This enables oil and gas to be safely transported from the offshore fields to land to provide secure energy supplies.”

“Jet Swords” can also be used to, oh I dunno, slice apart undersea telecom cables in preparation for the oncoming robot destruction!

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

And on a lighter note, here’s my favorite video of a crab being catastrophically decompressed into a deep sea pipe:

The pressure was something like 2700psi at a depth of 6000ft, and from what I could gather the cut the rov was making was something like .25 inches wide. Good Times!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 10:57 am and is filed under Bill Joy Might Be Right, Neat Stuff, Robot Overlords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.